[Noisebridge-discuss] Sleeping at NB

[Moxie Marlinspike]

On 12/24/2010 02:42 PM, Danny O'Brien wrote:

> * Create actual, narrow roles and delegate to them -- "prince of
> trash-keeping", "posse of financiers', "nightwatchmen", "printer
> monitor". Have these people report to Meeting regularly, and be
> transparent in what they do. Allow roles to shift, but ensure that one
> responsibility of the role is to find and train the successor.

Yeah, these people are sometimes known as "bottom-liners" in
anarchist-project parlance. The idea is that a consensus delegates
responsibility for a specific project component, chore, or idea to
someone for coordination.  That person has no authority, and isn't "in
charge" so much as they're "on the hook."  In practice this person
shouldn't be taking out the trash, but instead actively coordinating
volunteers to take out the trash.  But if they can't find anyone for
whatever reason, they're on the hook as the one who's there dragging a
trashbag across the space.

> * Change to near unanimity consensus at Meeting --
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making#Near-unanimous_consensus

Despite the fact that you'd never get consensus to switch to
not-consensus, I don't actually know that this change would be very
effective.  It's true that the consensus process at NB meetings feels
somewhat difficult, but I'm not sure that this change is actually in the
right direction.  Normally consensus draws people towards compromise,
but by contrast I've most often seen people lead with some really
ridiculous out-of-the-question positions at the NB meetings I've been
to.  It's like people might not really "get" the concept, and instead
treat it as some kind of extreme super-majority version of voting, such
that you have to exacerbate the polarity of everything you say and argue
even more strenuously than normal in order to try and convince everyone
of your rightness.  Sometimes the facilitator will even say "alright now
we're going to vote" when they're talking about consensus.  There are
also things that don't make any sense at all -- I've even heard "I'm
blocking your block."

I think I've heard someone say the word "block" like ten times in ten
years of consensus meetings outside of NB, but it's not uncommon to hear
it that many times at each individual NB meeting I've been to.

So yeah, maybe it makes sense to switch to a more voting-oriented model
of decision making if that's what's happening anyway, but it might also
be worth trying consensus before giving up on consensus.  =)

Or to be utterly practical, consensing on not-consensus is going to be
impossible, so it's probably most effective to really work on refining
and smoothing the consensus process itself.  Seems like there's a lot of
room there.

> * [More contentious] We need an explicit process for challenging those
> who challenge the ideas of noisebridge. Some feel that involves
> calling the police, I feel that's a failure of our system. Jake says,
> and many agree with him, that we just need to go talk to people. But
> we don't, or if we do, we rarely report back. We need to actually have
> a process to do this, and commandeer some brave soul  to do it and
> report back to meeting.

To bring up your "bizzaro world coming to geek culture" reference, the
anarchist infoshop scene has parallels to noisebridge.  A place like the
long haul infoshop in the east bay is somewhat similar to noisebridge
(without the technology).  It's part collective, part public space, is
open for anyone to walk in, and also has regularly scheduled events. But
the really big difference in how it's run is that it's staffed by a
collective member during all open hours.

For better or worse, I've never seen an infoshop that was just... open.
 There's always someone in the space or sitting by the door who is doing
a shift, mostly working on whatever they want, but also answering
questions for new people who come in and keeping an eye on the space.
If there's nobody staffing, the space is closed to non-collective
members.  The hacker dojo has something like this as well, with a little
LCD screen showing photos of the members who are staffing at the moment.
 This also has the nice side effect of getting collective members in the
space more often than just the 1-hour weekly meeting, as well as really
clearly drawing the line between collectively-run project and public space.

I've also been surprised by how lightly the membership process is taken
at NB.  If anyone who wants to can become a member at noisebridge, it's
likely to have a normalizing effect that will make NB difficult to
differentiate from any other public space.  Presumably Noisebridge was
started with a purpose in mind, if even generally speaking.  Every
member of the Noisebridge collective is essentially a curator of its
"geography."  Right now nothing happens through the collective, and so
it's open for anyone to curate however they'd like, with sometimes
interesting and sometimes off-putting effects.

- moxie

-- 
http://www.thoughtcrime.org